GSA to decide if cloud broker services work

Mark Day, director, GSA's Office of Strategic Programs in the Federal Acquisition Service

The General Services Administration will decide this summer whether a brokerage
model will work for cloud computing.

The Homeland Security Department and one other large agency have signed up for the
short-term pilot.

Mark Day, GSA's director of the Office of Strategic Programs in the Federal
Acquisition Service, wouldn't say who the second agency is because the memorandum
of agreement has not yet been finalized.

He said it is a large, complex agency with a number of bureaus and a good test
case for cloud brokerage services.

"Really the pilot is a proof of concept operation," Day said. "We want to
understand how well the cloud brokerage concept would work? Does it meet certain
customer needs that we've laid out? Does it appear to be economical in its
operation? Can we predict pricing and quality the way we need to, to make it a
real service that can be a value to the customer?"

Day said GSA is in the final stages of preparing a small acquisition that would be
just for the proof of concept.

GSA hopes to get the acquisition awarded this summer and the proof of concept done
this year.

"We are looking at the platform that we would use to run the service in the proof
of concept stage," he said. "It is not a large one. It will not be an IDIQ for
future use by other agencies so it will not be a large acquisition. For those who
thought I just said a $100 million opportunity, I did not."

What Day did say, however, is the proof of concept will help determine the
direction GSA goes in the future in offering cloud brokerage services.

Additionally, the Defense Information Systems Agency also is exploring the cloud
broker concept for the Defense Department.

DoD chief information officer Teri Takai issued a cloud strategy and mandated
other military services and agencies buy cloud services only from DISA unless they
receive a waiver from her office.

GSA has no such mandate from the Office of Management and Budget, but sees an
opportunity to give agencies something they already are asking for.

Day said agencies are using the Alliant governmentwide acquisition contract to
purchase cloud integration services five times more often than buying through the
infrastructure-as-a-service or email-as-a-service contracts.

"Many agencies are in a position where they need to integrate different cloud
services," he said. "They have the cloud service agreement, but need to integrate
that cloud service with other cloud services or legacy services, or it's part of a
shared service they would like to sell to others. They don't want to have to do a
one-by-one integration with another agency customer. They want to be able to say,
‘here's my shared service, connect to it this way.' It's much more seamless and
it's much easier for them administratively as a seller or as a consumer."

Day said while GSA is starting the proof of concept with two agencies, there are
about 20 others who are interested in the concept, including the departments of
Health and Human Services, Justice, DHS and NASA.

So if there is that much interest in cloud broker services, why not just add the
functionality to the Alliant contract.

One of the things about Alliant is GSA designed it to meet the changing needs of
the federal technology environment.

Day said there are some technical challenges from a regulatory standpoint as to
why Alliant can't include cloud broker services.

"Alliant is a GWAC and GWACs can't offer IDIQ-type task orders. Cloud broker by
its nature has to have the ability to be elastic in its sizing," he said. "If you
want to add multiple providers, higher capacity or more services, you can't do
that without an IDIQ type contract. So let's say the cloud broker begins by doing
all your single sign-on integration, not only with the cloud providers but with
your legacy system so you have a true single sign-on for your employees. Then,
later you say it would be good if they do your service level monitoring. And later
you say you'd like for them to monitor for performance in real time. So there are
many different kinds of services they might perform and as we learn and grow, we
will find out there are more and more services that can be done this way and
reduce complexity."